Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have with me Dr. Lee Edmonds. He’s been teaching medicine and Bible for over 40 years. He teaches patients, young doctors, counselees, and church members, all with passion to grow in their understanding of the subject. Lee and his wife, Jean, live in Cooperstown, New York, where Lee practices pulmonary and sleep medicine. They are the parents of five grown children. Dr. Edmonds, it’s so great to be with you today. Thanks for joining me.
Dr. Lee Edmonds: Thanks for the invitation, Dale.
Dale Johnson: We’re going to talk about the subject of the senses, and this crosses over the concept of the body and the inner man. I’m so grateful for us to tackle this subject. I’m looking forward to how you’re going to address some of these issues. I want us to first start by thinking about the senses or sensuality. That’s a common topic today. We may not think about it or press our minds to think about it much, but it’s very natural for us to be sensual-type people. What’s the notion of sensuality that you’re describing here?
Dr. Lee Edmonds: Well, I think the first thing we have to always recognize is that God made us sensate creatures, and gave us senses to use to see the world we live in. I think culturally that’s been hijacked in some ways, but if you really get down to the notion, even if you look in Webster for the definition of sensuality, it has to do with the gratification of the senses and physical pleasure, especially around sexuality because that’s such an intense pleasure for people. But the gratification doesn’t happen in your eyes, that happens in your mind. So you realize that what’s really behind our senses, what we really listen with and look with is our minds and not our eyes and ears. I think some of the confusion comes from the culture, which reduces us to biology so that it’s about brains and hormones and other things. But the reality of the Scriptures teach us that the heart, the inner man, is what we really sense with. But those other things are present. We become unhooked from those when we die, and our eyes and our ears end up in a box in the ground, and yet we still exist and we still have a capacity to be gratified in who God is and what He’s doing.
Dale Johnson: That’s clarifying as far as a definition. You even mentioned some of what I would consider to be common misunderstandings regarding sensuality. I want you to describe if there are more misunderstandings or even get into what makes the body soul reality rather difficult to understand and how sensuality is essentially the pinnacle of that. So describe some of those things.
Dr. Lee Edmunds: I think we as humans really struggle with certain interfaces and some of those are physicality and spirituality. It doesn’t matter whether you talk about the providence of God and His hand and what we’re doing, there’s just confusion and a fuzz around the edges of how that works. Whether you talk about Jesus’s humanity and divinity, identifying one as physical and one as spiritual, there’s fuzz around that. When you start to talk about how your own body and soul interact, you would be amiss to say you don’t have a body and that your body doesn’t influence you. As a matter of fact, your body can influence you in very bad ways. You could have increased desires because desire doesn’t sit in the brain. It sits in that mind, in that inner man, in that heart. Those desires can come from bodily things. I like to talk about the notion of being hangry. When you’re at that point in the day, there’s something happening to you physically that’s driving your inner man in a direction that you might not want to go, that you might have to take some measures to prevent. But that interface is very hard in the world we live in where everything is so scientific and biologic. When you have a problem, it has to be your body. It can’t be your soul because many people don’t even recognize that we have a soul and they just bounce right through it. Unfortunately, it’s in the church. The church is a product of, in part, the culture. People think the way the culture thinks, which is: “If you have a problem, you need to go to the body people.”
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s well said. I think us clarifying even a little bit more, as you’re doing here, is helpful. You mentioned Jesus. I’m interested to hear a little bit more about that description of Jesus and how you’re thinking about His life here on earth. Jesus had a physical body. How does thinking about Jesus really help us with this concept of sensuality?
Dr. Lee Edmonds: I think that interfaces with our understanding of what it is to be human. The notion that we’re made in the image of God has nothing to do with our physicality. God doesn’t have physicality; He is spiritual. Jesus, for all of eternity, was in that position until He became incarnate and was made in the image of man as it tells us in Romans 8. Then He took on that body, and all the issues – we’ll just say problems – of having a body. Yet, He was able to do that, even while He was hungry in the desert and being tempted by Satan himself, He was able to focus on the Father’s will. That’s what He came to do. He says that repetitively all through John: it’s my desire to do the Father’s will, not my will, but your will. He says it in a variety of ways. He was able to not sin and even obeyed to the point of physical sensate pain, and still did not shrink back from that and just pushed through in obedience and became the perfect sacrifice for us, as it says in Hebrews.
Dale Johnson: That’s a distinct explanation of Jesus with a body – how He’s enduring temptation not being caused by the body, right? That’s so helpful to think through. As we think about sensuality a little bit more, one of the places where we maybe see sensuality come to the forefront quite a bit, especially in biblical literature, biblical writing, and our own personal experience, is at the cusp of temptation, where we see our senses definitely at play when we’re feeling temptation. Describe how temptation really works in this area of sensuality.
Dr. Lee Edmonds: Obviously, as biblical counselors, we love James 1:13 where it talks about temptation. When you look at that closely, the initial point is the desire. If you have no desire for something, then you really don’t become tempted by it. I like to use the example of if I go to the grocery store and I drop my wife off and I’m just driving around the parking lot waiting for my wife to get that one item, I can go by parking places and that doesn’t bother me. I have no desire for a parking place in that moment. But if I really want a parking place, and then Dale zips in there ahead of me, then something different happens. And it’s really not the parking place. It’s not even that you took the parking place. It’s that I wanted the parking place. Desire is what really starts our temptation moving. Then of course, as it tells us, when that gives birth to sin, we move from just a simple temptation. Jesus had temptations in the desert, but He didn’t sin. We move on into actions, and not necessarily even actions. Jesus told us you could commit adultery in your heart. We move to a position of sin that started from a temptation that really started from a desire. If we could just desire the Father’s will like Jesus, we would be doing better.
Dale Johnson: That’s so true. As we think about biblical change, there’s certainly a means that we see in the Scriptures of biblical change which incorporates changing desire and those types of things as we move toward outward expressions. The senses are certainly involved in that. I want you to describe a little bit of our role in navigating temptation, especially as it relates to that concept of biblical change.
Dr. Lee Edmonds: I think it’s important that we understand that when we’re born again, there’s a lot of things that happen that God declares done, such as righteousness and no penalty of sin. One of the things that we have to understand is that biologically we don’t change. We have the same DNA. We may even have the same problems, the same bad marriage. The one thing that really is significant, that I think we sometimes overlook, is the fact that we’re indwelled with the divine, that the Holy Spirit takes up residence. Jesus said He was going to be our paraclete. He was going to help us. He was going to remind us. There are preventative actions available to us that we really didn’t have before we came to Christ. Working with that, when we look at our sufficiency passage in 2 Peter, it’s very interesting that in that passage it talks about us entering the divine and having the divine to escape evil desires. In the very next paragraph, it goes on, linking back to the previous paragraph. It tells us we add to our faith. There’s a whole list of things that we need to be doing. There’s things that we have to participate in under the direction of the Holy Spirit, as He, as it says in Romans, shapes our desires, not to be to the old man, the way we used to think and live and desire, but to what the Spirit desires. That transition is done with the help of the Holy Spirit. It’s not like you put the Bible under your pillow and wake up in the morning and your desires are all different. There’s work to be done.
Dale Johnson: In managing those senses, if you will, or correcting what we see through those portals – how we interpret them in our heart and mind – I appreciate you bringing up the work of the Holy Spirit and what He does in the inner man to help us to change. He helps even in the way that we see, the way that we hear, the way that we project desires as we interact with the physical world. I think that’s so helpful conceptually. If you want to talk a little bit more about biblical change, I kind of want to move in the direction, if we can, Lee, to talk about sensuality in terms of sexuality. One of the ways in which we see sensuality impacting our culture, maybe at a really deep level, is in the area of sexuality. It’s not the only way we experience sensuality, of course, as you’ve mentioned with several good illustrations. I’m going to borrow the parking lot illustration, by the way. I think that’s brilliant. I’m thinking of instances in my own mind where I’m saying, “Man, that’s actually true.” Getting back to sexuality – this is maybe the most prominent way that we’re seeing the senses be overtaken in our culture. Describe what makes sexuality just such a unique area of sensual sin.
Dr. Lee Edmonds: First of all, Scripture tells us that that’s the one sin that we commit that’s really against our own bodies. I think that goes back to, again, a biblical understanding of the anthropology of man. When God created man in His image, that was the non-material component of us, not the physicality. He also mentions that He made them male and female. That’s an identity issue that strikes at the core of being human. If you’re confused on that issue, of being made in the image of God, and then being made either male or female, He doesn’t mention other types. If that confusion is there, there’s a problem, and that is definitely true in our culture. From that confusion arises a confusion around sexuality and what the purpose of it is. If you pull apart Genesis and you reduce it down a little bit, you realize that one of the things we all know is that sexuality is about reproduction, but that’s not true culturally. Now, you can actually have children without sex and you want and can have sex without having children. That whole notion of reproduction has really been altered in the purpose of sexuality. I think even somewhat more important is that notion of uniting two flesh in a spiritual fashion. In sexual sin, you’re sinning against your own identity of who God made you to be and how you’re to relate to the opposite sex. People now really just go straight to the third component that God made regarding sex, which is pleasure. It becomes all about pleasure, not about reproduction and not strengthening a marriage. As biblical counselors, we know that many marriages are actually pushed apart by sexual mistakes, sins, misunderstandings, discontentment, and the list goes on. We have to get back to that mutual uniting, which has to occur. It has to occur with a regular fashion. These are things which are part of how God wants marriage to function. I think we have to regain that. The devil knows that sex is extremely powerful. It is a spiritual experience of union that he has twisted completely. The culture just follows it.
Dale Johnson: As you’re thinking about sexuality – and this is something that’s just in our face every single day – I think about Paul and I think about his concept of Philippians 3:3, for example. We’re not to give any credibility to the flesh. We’re not to move in that direction whatsoever at all. All of us experience that sensual drive or desire in so many ways which are motivated by our sinful nature, our flesh, as the Bible describes. It being so prevalent in our culture makes it very difficult. It’s something we fight consistently. Describe how we as Christians can overcome some of those sensual temptations and how we can guard our hearts from those sensual temptations. How would you help us think through that biblically?
Dr. Lee Edmonds: When we think about no provision, we think about not making opportunities, but I think the no provision also means to remove opportunities. For example, if we go back to hangry, of course we want to change the desires of our heart, but we also want to reduce the temptation. So maybe you need to carry snacks in your bag so you don’t get so hangry. When it comes to sexuality, or whatever your temptation is, if it’s a drug or whatever, you need to be proactive and understand that when John baptized, he baptized into repentance, but when Jesus was going to baptize, it was with the Holy Spirit. There’s a preemptive component to our lives now that we can think about in the areas where we have difficulty and we can make those measures. We can talk, we can do things with intentionality to remove those opportunities. I was at the hotel this morning and, of course, I was on a machine and there were these images coming up that I didn’t really want. I just had to put the towel over it. I’m getting rid of that. I’m not going to be here. Then we do things that are proactive, for example, for our marriages. How do you develop that intimacy in the area of sexuality with your spouse? One of my pet peeves is to ask people, “What’s on your home screen on your phone? Is it your grandkids, or your kids, or is it your spouse?” Let’s develop that proactively and nurture that and discuss that. Sexuality doesn’t get discussed, and there’s no man who understands a woman’s experience in sexuality. There’s no woman who understands a man’s experience. If we don’t share and actually have conversation and be intimate with our spouses, there’s going to be more danger.
Dale Johnson: This has been so helpful, brother. This is a topic we need to continue to think more and more about because we are impacted, we are embodied souls, we do have senses, but we need to understand it in relation to how God made us as individuals, incorporating our mind, the desires, the will, affection, and so on. You’re helping to lead us in thinking about this. I’m appreciative of it. Thanks, Lee, for being with us.
Dr. Lee Edmonds: Thanks for having me, Dale.
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